


Through the Winter

by always_teatime



Series: Better Days [3]
Category: Batman - All Media Types, Batman: Arkham (Video Games), Batman: The Animated Series
Genre: Aromantic Character, Asexual Character, F/M, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-10
Updated: 2020-08-10
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:20:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25816450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/always_teatime/pseuds/always_teatime
Summary: Edward finds out Mr. Freeze is making a serum for Batman. Batman and Edward reconcile and bring Arkham City down.
Relationships: Batman & Alfred Pennyworth, Batman/Riddler, Bruce Wayne & Alfred Pennyworth, Bruce Wayne/Edward Nygma, Edward Nygma & Bruce Wayne, Edward Nygma & Jim Gordon, Edward Nygma & Victor Fries, Nora Fries & Victor Fries (mentioned), Riddler & Batman, Riddler & Mr. Freeze, Victor Fries/Nora Fries (mentioned), past Batman/Talia al Ghul (mentioned)
Series: Better Days [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/738378
Comments: 14
Kudos: 48





	Through the Winter

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for the end of Arkham City.

_[“People are saying Joker poisoned Batman.”](http://arkhamcity.wikia.com/wiki/Arkham_City#Arkham_City_Inmate_Quotes) _

<http://arkhamcity.wikia.com/wiki/Arkham_City#Arkham_City_Inmate_Quotes>

If Edward had set up Arkham City, he would have done it better. He would have done it with more purpose and less occult bullshit. Hugo Strange and Ra's al Ghul's scheme reeked of bad television, and Edward almost wished he never uncovered their detailed designs for turning Gotham into a mechanism that collected, slowly flayed, and transmuted people's souls into occult bullshit energy.

He wished he could scoff at the melodrama. He'd mock them later. But he'd never forget the dread that festered in his gut every time he curled up to sleep in one of his hideaways. He felt a final night in that city coming like an animal before a hurricane.

Real geniuses didn't let logic blind them. Edward had read enough about Tesla to know: mysticism and intellect often went together in the greatest minds. Maybe that wasn't an accident. Maybe occult bullshit was the truth. Edward could feel the doom hanging over Arkham, and he knew he'd die if he was still there when it descended.

But the prison ghetto walls penned him in. He couldn't run. He didn't have a choice.

Strange and al Ghul’s meatgrinder was working as intended.

So Edward recruited informants. He built traps. He hid from the proud and the powerful in a depressing, familiar routine, while keeping up alliances with some lesser outcasts. Catwoman and the Hatter generally knew where he was, and he even gave a spare GCPD lab key to Mr. Freeze. The old ice man was all right, insofar as his motives were transparent, and Edward had always taken care to avoid standing between him and whatever holy grail he thought Nora needed.

“Victor,” called Edward, and he banged on the frosted lab door. He pulled his (disgusting, dirty, threadbare, stolen off a corpse) coat closer around his neck. He waited for acknowledgment from within. It was best not to startle superhumans, mutants, or whatever Freeze actually was. Edward had no such special power, no genetic resilience, no low budget karate film's moves. He only had fluke upon fluke of intellect that would collapse when eyes were on him and it really counted.

“Enter.”

Edward hit the doorknob with his fist. Ice cracked and dropped off it to the floor. He scraped the hinges, then let himself in and slung his heavy backpack onto the nearest table, next to smoking glass beakers.

“Take care.” Victor's voice was always so oddly smooth. Which made it all the more unsettling when, sometimes, at the ends of his sentences, there'd be a decompression and a sudden whooshing sound out of the carapace he lived in. “I am working on a delicate composition. Poisons must be made much worse before becoming their antidote. I haven't even screened for bloodborne diseases, there is so little time.”

Edward jumped back with a disgusted noise. So that red liquid was really—“Eugh. Well, what's it for?”

“Joker's sickness. You must have heard.”

“Random thugs' rumors are beneath my notice.” But his informants said the same thing. “So. Joker's blood. Who came looking for help, then? Harley?”

“Oh, no.” _FWSSSH._ “This is Batman's. Joker performed a transfusion.”

Edward felt the cold then in his gut. He tried to think. He couldn't get beyond what Victor said. It was like his mind was backpedaling. Trying to blind him and protect him from a long white hallway of fear that felt like the occult dread of night. “A transfusion.”

Victor held a frosted red vial up to the light. He swirled it, then extended his free hand. “If you please. The anticoagulant.”

Cold clotting blood. A transfusion. Edward saw it in a flash—a dark room, the two chairs, the blood hanging between Batman and the Joker in plastic wires and bags. Swallowing against a heave in his stomach, he handed Victor the requested vial. He wondered if he should have smashed it instead. “Why do you have Batman's blood?” he demanded. “Why are you helping him?”

“It's for Nora.”

“Of course it is. But you can't trust Batman.”

“Do I look like a fool? I'll cure him after he helps me, not before. I asked for his assistance today against Cobblepot, and that made him angry. He yanked the cryo-stabilizer out of my heart and spread half its fuel on the floor.”

Edward nodded distractedly. “But you'll save him.”

“I'm not a monster. I won't lose sleep if he suffers, but I don't want him dead.”

“How bad is he?”

“Terminal, without my help. Veins on his face were turning black.”

“What an idiot.” It was the cold making Edward’s voice shake. Just the cold. “What a self-righteous idiot. He shouldn't be walking around like that.”

“You know how these heroes are, consumed with arbitrary missions and punishment. They don’t realize the value of what they sacrifice. Time, health, lives. I… I am reasonable. Once I can be with Nora again, I’ll stop. But Batman’s only goal seems to be punishment. Of us, of course, when he catches us. And punishment of himself when he can’t.”

“He’ll never stop,” Edward spat. “He throws people away. And he’ll betray you somehow, you just watch. He’ll ruin everything.”

“Either way, he'll need this serum in an hour at most.”

“Then get it up to body temperature,” said Edward, “or it’ll kill him anyway.”

Victor nodded to the Bunsen burner, where a light orange and blue teardrop flame licked a metal plate. Periodically, it spat. The lab's gas line still worked, but it was unsteady. “Yes, we’ll avoid further harm to his blood. As, again, we are better than him.”

Of course Victor had thought of that. He was the expert cryochemist, the perfect and prestigious big brain. Or he would be, if he weren’t a villain. If he and Edward weren’t both tied on the same altar.

Edward cleared his throat and tapped his foot. He looked around the lab again. One chalkboard had a series of formulas scrawled on it in big block letters, surrounded by erasure smudges, which Victor glanced at from time to time. And here Edward thought Victor was so smart he did everything in his head.

Edward watched Victor work. Watched the world's greatest cryochemist conquer a problem outside his specialty. Yes, Victor Fries was probably one of the smartest people in the world. He was adaptable, innovative, practical, and loyal. The way he placed Nora before everything else was what Edward had craved for himself all his life. What would it be like to have someone committed to him like that? What did he have to do to be worth it?

How did people move from a first meeting into that? Was there some process to it? Could the process be learned?

Probably. But he was afraid. And he was afraid he finally knew what his fear meant.

There was an experiment where scientists put pigeons in a box. The scientists dropped food in randomly, and the pigeons thought there was logic to it. They thought they were being rewarded for whatever they were doing the first time food showed up. So they squawked, flapped, or turned in circles forever, eventually starving to death.

The scientists theorized that people ultimately functioned the same way.

He was going to keep making bad decisions. He wasn't able to change. He would walk down that hallway. He never had any control.

There was no logic to this habit Edward had, to why he kept seeking—what? Had he ever assigned a word to it? Did the word even exist? He thought about his source of once-comfort that he knew now would only dispense pain, if it gave him anything. If it—if he—if they all survived, what words would Edward even use to ask for the life he wanted to be living?

Edward ducked out of the laboratory, and out of the old GCPD station itself, again for a while. Having nothing to say was harder when somebody was there who might have been willing to listen. Being in a familiar place was more difficult when it wasn’t how he remembered it. And most uncomfortable of all was how much he clung to both, in memories and in the moment.

###

_[“Freeze and Batman were fighting back at the GCPD. Sounded like something out of a movie.”](http://arkhamcity.wikia.com/wiki/Arkham_City#Arkham_City_Inmate_Quotes) _

<http://arkhamcity.wikia.com/wiki/Arkham_City#Arkham_City_Inmate_Quotes>

Edward came back to the GCPD building, after what felt like it might have been an hour or two later. He wasn’t sure anymore how time went by, or if time still existed. It seemed to stand still, and then it would rush, and if he thought too hard about it, his mouth would start to taste like earth, and fog would creep in from the sides of his vision.

He’d run around, checked on sources. He got the impression they were lying more to him lately. Maybe it was disrespect. Maybe they thought he’d kill them if they didn’t produce. Idiots. So stupid. And Edward the stupidest for relying on them, he thought. Either way, he hadn’t learned anything.

He thought back to his entry into Arkham City. Back to when the Bat—well, after that. After the end of what should have been Edward’s new beginning.

The police hadn’t announced him. The entry was done quietly, and whether that was an intentional act of mercy, Edward couldn’t tell. They had also given him a multitool, a folded map, and a signed commissioner's courtesy card. Edward had stopped trying to figure out what Gordon's game was months ago, so he didn't give those final gifts any further thought before he moved like a rat into Hugo Strange's prison experiment.

Since Arkham City's walls conveniently smothered one of the GCPD buildings where Edward once worked, he hastened to the lab there and dug essentials out of the vault and the walls—supplies, components, weapons and narcotics for barter. He fortified it, and considered the results good under the circumstances—given he also had a good start on a security system. He hadn’t fallen so far from his old habits after the Asylum that he neglected to bug up the GCPD while he worked there.

So, no, his sources hadn’t been productive tonight. But his bugs and surveillance system had.

“Well, that was a fiasco, wasn’t it,” said Edward. He had listened to the whole scuffle in the lab, and to talk of a safe being broken into. The precious vial had been stolen, and then it had been retrieved. Presumably it had been administered. Edward was hungry, cold, and tired, and not up to sweating the details. Someone with more money and freedom could do that. All Edward needed to know was that there had been another episode of violence in another of his tentative sanctuaries. Forget the reasons, forget the players, forget the consequences; as far as Edward was concerned, they all blurred together and ought to fade to nothingness. The storm ought to suck itself out to sea and leave only what really mattered, if anything mattered at all. Perhaps then, if some bare bones remained—if one scrap did not drain away—that might be counted as proof, finally, that there had been a point to any of this, and something, anything, once mattered after all.

The darkness behind Edward made no sound.

“All for one little antidote. You wouldn’t believe the trouble old Victor went to.”

There was no sound. There was no light. But there was a roughness and a warmth that hovered behind Edward’s neck.

“And then you have to keep running around. I guess it worked out. So I don’t know why you’re back here. Don’t you have cops to save, Bat? Aren’t you on a quest to keep me from becoming a murderer? Go ahead. Explain yourself. I’ll wait. I’m used to you thinking I’ve got nothing better to do than wait on you!”

Ahead of him, metal clanged. Thick frost shattered and fell in chunks like glass to the floor as Victor stepped out of a door. He turned his helmet curiously toward Edward. “Mr. Nygma? Did I hear you shouting?”

Edward looked behind him. Into the darkness. Slightly above it, in the vent, somebody was still there. He felt a presence nestled against the dread hanging over Arkham, like a sweet syrupy ache. He told Victor, “Oh, no. Don’t worry about it. Just a little acoustic experiment. You know I have to calibrate my surveillance system. Seems like every day a little leathery gremlin turns it off in the vents.”

“Hm.” _FWSSSH._ “Well, I am heading to the supply dump. I could use your assistance in plotting the route. You have your sources and… experience. With the threats.” His red eyes focused on the spot in the rafters above that throbbed in Edward like a second heart.

“Of course you ask. I am the best. I’ll be along when I’m done here, Victor. Experiments to be finished. Shouting. Yes. Don’t be alarmed.”

With another ambiguous hum, Victor withdrew again, leaving Edward with the vent.

“I’ll have you know,” Edward told the vent, “I’m smarter than you. I’m better, and I’m stronger, and I know you’re there, damn it. You think you’re so sneaky. But you’re so obvious. And it’s so cold, and I’m angry with you. You have a lot to answer for.” He stripped off his gloves and threw them on the ground, followed by his bulky coat. He kept only his thin street clothes and boots. He’d rather rip his skin and nerve endings than the dead men’s clothes cocoon that kept him alive, which he’d need to put back on when this was over. “You know I’ll hurt myself trying to get down. Probably have my fingers too numb. So if you’re a hero, you’ll… you’ll save me.” He broke off, coughed, and rubbed his hands together. His lips were already getting numb. “Okay. One, two, ten!”

He vaulted up a chair, then a box, then grabbed the piping—so cold it burned—and squirmed into the vent.

Only darkness. He grabbed it.

And it grabbed him back, like a vise. It pulled him into an embrace in that black velvet room. Black as the blood that might still be calcifying in its cable-thick veins.

###

_[“Batman wouldn't break in here just to get Joker. He's after something else."](http://arkhamcity.wikia.com/wiki/Arkham_City#Arkham_City_Inmate_Quotes) _

<http://arkhamcity.wikia.com/wiki/Arkham_City#Arkham_City_Inmate_Quotes>

Bruce caught Edward, hauled him in, and wrapped his cloak around them. He stripped off his gauntlets and chestplate in one smooth motion. He kicked the armor behind him and closed himself around the form of this man who was far slimmer than he remembered. He hissed, “Eddie, you’ll freeze.”

“It would be all your fault.”

“Come on, Eddie. Why’d you do this?”

“I could feel you here, and in the walls.” He paused. “And the trophies. I can tell where you’ve been.”

“So they’re not just bait. They’re a tracking mechanism. You’re smartest man I ever met.”

“Did you seriously not realize before that they have a secondary purpose? Well, anyway. Smart won’t save any of us.” Wrapped up as they were, with Edward’s head buried in Bruce’s neck, his body temperature was steady, but he began shuddering more and more. “Do you know yet? Do you know what the secret is?”

“No, I don’t, Edward. I’m trying—”

“When will you see you can’t do this alone?” he snapped. “I figured it out! You need me!”

“I know. I do need you.” Bruce rubbed his back helplessly. “I tried your informants—”

“I don’t tell them anything! They know the streets and the people, but I know what’s coming. And you can’t stop it, Bat. You can’t see it. We’re all going to die. Hugo and R’as and their engine… It’s evil. And you put me in here so they’ll feed me to it. You’re in league with them. You always have been! Seeking death!”

He was ranting like an oracle. Like the tape Batman found on Arkham Island that had turned out to be the truth.

“Why, Bat?” Edward’s voice fell suddenly, to an almost detached hush. “Why do we always have to die? Why can’t there be a way out? Why don’t you want to _look at us_?” He snarled it, at the last.

Out of all the forces grappling in Gotham, Edward had always somehow made the most sense. Batman had thought it was because riddles were logical. But they weren’t, were they? They were subjective. Because the better you knew the person asking, then the easier that kind of contest became. Edward and he had always been well suited, and not really because of logic. There was something… some understanding… some way they fit, that drew them both in.

Intuition? Maybe that was it. Maybe it was the keenness with which they felt injustice. They were always fitted together, clutching the same truth from opposite directions. Sometimes Bruce thought a mirror’s edge was what they shared, and it might be madness if they ever touched and crossed through to the other’s side.

Edward had always seen what Bruce couldn’t.

“Tell me what to do,” said Batman.

“Look,” said Edward. “Here’s where you _look_.”

And, shivering, he poured out everything that Bruce and Batman and all the other parts that felt so alone and disconnected and overwhelmed had been missing. Motives, locations, mechanisms. Names and times. And the city fell into place again, and there was a plan.

Batman knew what he needed to do, so he thanked Edward and let him go.

###

_["They're letting us starve. I know it."](https://arkhamcity.fandom.com/wiki/Arkham_City#Arkham_City_Inmate_Quotes) _

<http://arkhamcity.wikia.com/wiki/Arkham_City#Arkham_City_Inmate_Quotes>

Edward dropped down into the hallway. He didn’t need to look back to know he was once again alone. He put himself together, one article of ill fitting winter clothing at a time, and kicked ice off the door again before letting himself back in the lab. He felt sick, bitter, and drained. He could hardly feel his hands.

A phrase floated back to him: a deep resonant voice reading the title of a book. Edward’s new lessor, after Arkham Asylum but before Arkham City, was an old black Quaker who had welcomed Edward, their new second-chance tenant, with a gift. “ _Been in the Storm So Long_ ,” they had said, smiling kindly, while handing Edward a weathered paperback bearing that title. Edward carried the book everywhere for a while, and suddenly he missed the softness and the smell of its old pages more than anything. Been in the storm so long…

Where could Edward say he’d been, all this time? He wasn’t sure how he ended up here, but he also wasn’t sure there was a way he could have ended up anywhere else. Was there any way to get back to the world? And if he got there, what kind of new place would he want in it?

Why was Batman the one Edward challenged?

It wasn’t like he’d mapped out his options. But it might not be too late to go down a better path. Or at least one that was a little wider. There were so many holes in Edward’s life, he had trouble telling what he lacked or what he wanted.

What if Edward helped Victor save Nora? Would they, together, welcome Edward in? He imagined a brief flash of a future for the three of them, working together in a lab. The two Frieses standing behind him with hands on his shoulders, leaning forward to appreciate his work, like mythical doting parents.

“Victor,” said Edward. He took a deep breath and walked closer. Following Victor’s written instructions, he picked up a beaker that was nearly finished turning inky black and dropped in a capsule that made it turn gold. “When this works for you. When you get Nora back. What will you do next? What’s your plan?”

“We will go back to our happy life.” Victor’s red eyes squinted as he smiled. “We love science. We will have a lab.”

“Do you think you’ll have any use for another expert in there?” Edward had to duck his head. Victor had met his eyes, but he couldn’t take it anymore. He focused on the countertop and flexed his fingers in his too-thin gloves.

“Who do you have in mind?”

“Me. I mean me.”

Victor was silent for a while. He didn’t even move. Finally, a liquid boiled loudly, and Victor’s suit creaked as he shifted the beaker off the pan. He said, “I think that can be done.”

Edward found himself smiling. A warmth grew in his chest. He tried to fight back against showing it, but he didn’t succeed completely. He cleared his throat. “Ah! Well, then. I will have to think about what I’ll do. What project to tackle first. I am very ambitious.”

“You’ve been a forensic scientist lately, have you not?”

“When the lab techs are too slow, yes, but I don’t know if I’m passionate about it. That is, I mean, if it’s challenging enough.”

“Well, you’re still young. You will have time. Nora and I have collected many specialties. We will be quite pleased to help you find the direction you like most.” He paused a moment, and appeared lost in thought. “To tell you the truth, that will make us happier than anything. Such a large part of our lab work before was how we all grew to be like family. Nora and I never had children for a variety of reasons, but we liked guiding the next generation. I think Nora will be glad to know we’re already getting that part of our lives back.”

Edward wanted to ask about Victor and Nora’s variety of reasons. Was one or both of them, to some degree, like him? Victor’s devotion to Nora clearly ran deep as his soul, and Edward got the impression that was romantic, but Victor could still be asexual. And what about Nora? Edward imagined for a moment she was nearly exactly like him, not only asexual but on the aromantic spectrum, yet so successful and adored, and making something work with someone that felt like what Edward had been figuring out with… with his own someone, before this. The degree to which these thoughts comforted him was shocking, so much so that he could not bear to ask Victor now and have his hopes be dashed.

But he wanted to ask, someday. 

Edward had also read suggestions, at some point, that Victor insisting on being called “Mr. Fries” even though he held a doctorate could have a story. Most people thought that Victor was intentionally downgrading his status in order to give his wife precedence when both Dr. Frieses were addressed together. But maybe he’d had to fight to be recognized as a man. Maybe the answer was both of these reasons together.

Edward wanted Victor—and Nora—to be like him, and to want to tell him about it.

Arkham City, Edward thought, the bin of the unwanted. The place for villains. Why was it here that he found belonging? Why were other outcasts so kind?

Edward didn’t want to change. He’d never wished he wasn’t who he was. He’d just wished it could be easier, and he blamed the world. He blamed it more, and feared it more, every time he started to try to believe he’d found someone who was, if not like him, at least someone who could understand.

He kept walking down roads like this. He kept making—if not the same decisions—then still the same kind of decisions, and for the same reasons. But it wasn’t like he was falling into them. He wasn’t doing this because it was easy.

He wasn’t sure he could ever put into words why he _was_ doing it. But he was starting to test out whether he could believe that trying might be worth it someday.

###

_[“One day the walls are coming down...”](http://arkhamcity.wikia.com/wiki/Arkham_City#Arkham_City_Inmate_Quotes) _

<http://arkhamcity.wikia.com/wiki/Arkham_City#Arkham_City_Inmate_Quotes>

The battle was over. Batman carried the Joker out into the glare of the rising sun. He talked to Gordon, set the body down, and then he went back over the bridge, and he pushed the gates of Arkham City wide open.

Inside, in the growing light, dirty and bedraggled people poked their heads out of cracks. They emerged slowly, stooped and hesitant. It was like they had forgotten how to walk openly. They had forgotten what it might be like to walk out that gate again alive. To exist again, where Gotham could see them, and with them be one city.

Batman would fight anyone who stood in their way. They were criminals, some of them, they were even killers, but Batman was a killer now too, with the Joker bleeding away in his arms that morning. These were the outcasts. These were his people. Someday he would likely lock them away again, but he would do it on his terms, in a better prison, where maybe he would even be there with them. Maybe that would be a relief. And maybe together, they wouldn’t be happy, but they might feel something like a sense of peace.

He saw Edward coming down the main street, as thin and bent as he’d ever been. He huddled in dirty coats, and he limped on shoes not meant for survival, but he struggled on, one of the first to start walking toward the ghetto escape, one of the first to challenge Batman’s fearsome silhouette there.

Batman didn’t know where Edward found his courage and strength. He didn’t know where Edward put it, in his slender frame. He didn’t know how Edward held it in and kept it after how the world tried to take it away.

Edward reached him, looked him in the eye, and said, “We’re leaving.”

“I know,” said Batman, “we are. Let’s go.”

Edward quirked an eyebrow. “Do you think you’re one of us?”

“Us,” repeated Batman. “The only people in Gotham who aren’t us are the ones who don’t know it yet.”

“Hn.” Edward sniffed. “I hate to say it, but you’re right about that. We really are all mad here.” Edward peered behind Batman at the disheveled, half manned police perimeter. The officers had clearly taken losses against Strange’s enforcers.

“There’s Gordon. I bet he’ll be happy to give you a ride to your apartment.”

The old police chief was still standing on the bridge, out in the open in front of the barricade, watching whatever Batman had come back to do. He wore his trench coat, and he was smoking, the vapors blowing away in the harsh, briney, and hoarfrosted wind. He tried to hide it, but he kept all his weight on one leg in a way he hadn’t a few hours before. Anyone could see he’d waded into the Gotham-wide battle against Strange’s squads personally. When he saw Edward, strain vanished from him like a weight had fallen off his shoulders, and he smiled like a father who’d been waiting for his son.

“I suppose I can let him,” said Edward.

“You’ll find your apartment’s been paid for and kept up while you were gone.”

Edward paused. His face went as neutral as it only went when he was making an effort to school it that way. He said, “They’d better not have moved anything.”

“Don’t worry,” said Batman. “I didn’t.”

“Damn it.” Edward turned to him. His careful expression, like a mask, crumbled away. He covered his eyes with his hand, which was ungloved and turning blue. “Why do you have to… I had just almost made up my mind again. I was going to forget. I could do it.”

“I can’t do everything right. Sometimes I think I can’t do anything right. But if I can do one thing, I’ll do right by you. By us. By everyone like us.” Batman popped off his gauntlets and hooked them onto his belt. He took Edward’s hand, pulled it away from over his eyes, wrapped it up in as much warmth as he could give. He wiped tears from Edward’s face that the old Riddler insisted were attributable to the wind.

“When I was a child,” said Edward, “I entered a contest. It offered a prize for anyone who could solve an almost impossible logic problem. I won, of course.”

“Of course.”

“I cheated. I’ve decided I don’t regret it. Logic really doesn’t matter much, in the scheme of things. It takes more than that to win. The problem was only unsolvable because it was presented as a logic problem. Which led everyone else, the simple minded people, to exclude solutions. Solutions like cheating, like breaking the rules. Solutions like a life of crime. I’ve never been very logical, have I? You can’t be special or different if you play by the rules. Someone’s always going to be better at playing by them than you. That’s why Strange put his plan into the law. He thought he could win if he made the rules.”

“You always made up your own riddles. I’m not surprised by what you’re saying.”

“Does it bother you? That I still think I’m justified?”

“I thought I was justified, and look what I’ve done. I’ve hurt people on purpose. I’ve regretted it, sometimes, but other times I haven’t. I draw the line at killing, but I’ve ruined people’s lives. I’ve failed to save them. I’ve _let_ them die. I’m a vigilante. My logic breaks down after a point just as well.”

“So you’re finally admitting it?”

“I meant what I said,” said Batman. “Half the problems in this world come from people not knowing they’re mad.”

“And the other half?”

“The way calling it madness makes us draw lines between each other. The way that makes us think we can’t cross over.”

“Sounds like something a person could get locked up for saying.”

“It’s happened. In the past. Around here, all the time. To you. To us.” He hesitated. “But maybe not anymore.”

They walked across the bridge, and Edward got in Gordon’s car. Gordon handed off command to one of his detectives, and Batman worked a while longer, even though he felt strange to be standing in his suit in the open in daylight, surrounded by nothing more violent or dangerous than interviews and first aid. He remembered little of that afterward, or of how he got home and found himself looking like Bruce Wayne again by the fire. Through the study’s leaded glass window, he saw it was dark again. Either he’d been sitting here for a while, or he’d worked nearly all through the day until night.

Wrapped up in blankets and Alfred’s watchful presence, he looked at his scarred hands and wondered if he ever really fooled anyone in Gotham besides himself.

Something about that night in Arkham City made him wonder if he could change. He’d been trying so long to have an impact, in light and in darkness. He’d tried every path to justice imaginable, or so he had thought.

The problem for him up until the Asylum was that he’d walked down those paths alone. He had people who tried to be there with him, but he hadn’t made that easy for them.

He thought he was protecting them—Gordon and Alfred and Edward and the rest, all the people reaching toward him from the edges of his fortified life. But all that protecting had done was put Bruce and Batman in danger. He forced everyone else to either rescue him or pick up the pieces of his mistakes. He’d lived far more than two lives for so long, been his own ally and confidante and critic and patron and partner, that he’d forgotten other people could do those things—and in fact were, right in front of him, but he couldn’t see it.

He could try again. He could admit to himself now some of the problems he used as an excuse—the problems, for example, named Robin—was that he never really let them in. And with some of his relationships, with Talia—he’d thought it normal that she didn’t let him in. He could do better. He had been doing better. He’d tried something different, and it worked for him, with Edward.

Across from him, Alfred sat in the other armchair. He was mending a pair of gardening gloves, drawing a short, thin needle that shone like liquid through them and around the hems in a mesmerizing looping stitch that Bruce knew from experience would hold better than the original ever had.

He hadn’t realized such a gulf was yawning open between him and Alfred until this moment, day by day, wider and wider. There was so much he hadn’t seen until after the Asylum. And he still saw more every day, because of what he’d been through, and because of how Edward helped him see. Batman really couldn’t do this alone.

Bruce cleared his throat lightly, and gestured to Alfred’s sewing. “I wouldn’t mind learning how to do that.”

Alfred paused and glanced up. There was a long moment where Bruce saw him assessing, and somehow that was more terrifying than anything in the previous night. Finally, Alfred nodded, resumed stitching, and said, “It is a very practical skill, Master Bruce. I do wish you had wanted to learn younger. You were not easy at all on your clothes.”

It was true. Nothing Alfred said or did could keep him from climbing or crashing through every tree and patch of briar on the grounds.

“I was most fortunate,” said Alfred, as he kept working stitch by stitch, “my grandfather had a certain scheme in raising me. You see, one rip in my jacket too many after roughhousing with the local hooligans, and he decided if he got me mending it myself while sitting in one place, I would at once be doing useful work and kept out of trouble for the duration. _His_ grandfather had done candlemaking, a very profitable hobby for men at the time, but electricity was coming on, and as a butler he was already so well set for money…”

Bruce listened to Alfred tell him stories the way they had done when he was a child. How long had it been since they did this? Before Harvey, probably. Bruce hadn’t realized how much he missed it.

It was only as an adult that Bruce realized why Alfred had spent time with him telling stories by the fire, or over commonplace idle moments, when he was a child: this was what family did, and just as Bruce Wayne no longer had parents, Alfred didn’t have children.

Had Bruce ever asked about that? Was it possible Alfred was like Edward—and, if he was, did he feel alone in it?

And did he feel alone in general, because Bruce and Batman left him out of their thoughts and their time more and more often as the years went by?

When it grew late, and Alfred put down his needle and thread, stood, and started to hint Bruce ought to go to bed, Bruce said, “Alfred, I’m sorry.”

“Sorry for what, Master Bruce?”

“I got into some trouble, and I haven’t been myself.”

Alfred hummed. He cleared away tea from the table at Bruce’s elbow in a series of motions Bruce couldn’t quite follow, and which made no sound. “Well,” he said, “I can’t say I was pleased about it. But I saw the situation, and the politics. You must know I’ve been keeping my Remington in top shape, but of course no one dared come to this house.”

Bruce knew. For reasons far beyond that, he always felt safe here. He would have felt the same if the house was small, but not if he was in it alone. He said, “Thank you.”

“Shall I prepare anything else before you retire, Master Bruce?”

Bruce managed not to smile. “No, thank you, Alfred. I’ll go to bed.”

“Very good, Master Bruce.” Alfred stopped pointedly polishing the silverware and offered his arm.

They walked up the grand staircase, Alfred pretending not to notice as Bruce leaned more and more on him with every step. The City had been vicious, and Bruce would always carry some of its scars.

“Alfred,” said Bruce, in his room, before the butler left, “I have some things to fill you in on about the last few months. I’d like to talk about it over breakfast tomorrow morning. And I mean it—I’m sorry about how I’ve been. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“I expect you would have some difficulty.” Alfred—cool and yet caring, professional yet dry—regarded him from the doorframe. “It’s all right, Master Bruce. If I may say so, there have also been good changes in you these past months. I think you have grown and handled some challenges remarkably well. I’m sure we can catch up on it all in the morning. Good night, Master Bruce. Please rest well.”

“Good night, Alfred.”

The lights went out. The darkness was not frightening, and finally, he felt that he could rest.


End file.
